Abstract

Traditionally, NFV platforms were limited to using standard
virtualization technologies (e.g., Xen, KVM, VMWare, Hyper-V, etc.)
running guests based on general-purpose operating systems such as
Windows, Linux or FreeBSD. More recently, a number of light-weight
virtualization technologies including containers, unikernels
(specialized VMs) and minimalistic distributions of general-purpose
OSes have widened the spectrum of possibilities when constructing an
NFV platform. This draft describes the challenges in building such a
platform and discusses to what extent these technologies, as well as
traditional VMs, are able to address them.